Comment by spencerflem
2 days ago
“The Left” does not mean to the left of you personally. It’s like how there’s only two types of drivers, insane speeders and insane slowpokes and that’s true no matter how fast you drive :p
The “left” in terms of voters is against the genocide in Gaza and for socialist policies and candidates like Mamdani. Plenty of polls and evidence supports this.
NYT undid their endorsement policy to specifically Not endorse mamdani and is very biased against Palestine. Their opinion columns like David Brooks etc are blowhard conservatives too.
In terms of mainstream news sources, I consider the Guardian US to be a reasonable big tent news source for the center left.
NPR is centrist. They take no sides even if (imo) one is obviously correct.
NYT and WaPo is the ‘reasonable right’ (still report facts but with a right wing spin- see their billionaire owners).
Fox etc. are not news they are ‘entertainment’ and do not report facts and are a vile propaganda engine that must be destroyed
The NYT is not right. WaPo is perhaps a touch more right than the NYT but both are left-leaning and liberal. NPR is centrist but its editorials lean liberal.
You’ve cherry-picked a few stories where the NYT leaned more right, but on the whole the NYT, WaPo, and NPR certainly lean liberal or left of the general American public. The point of labels like right,left, liberal, conservative, etc. are relative valuations to the general American public. Just because the NYT leans less to the left on issues you are more to the left on does not make the NYT right-leaning.
Picking more: they pushed HARD the Claudine Gay story, putting it on the front page ten consecutive days. That story was a manufactured right wing operation to oust her. They also are still very anti-trans.
I am operating on: if they are to the right of mainstream democratic voters, those that won Mamdani the primary and overwhelmingly support Palestine, then they do not get to claim to be left wing.
> The “left” in terms of voters is against the genocide in Gaza and for socialist policies and candidates like Mamdani. Plenty of polls and evidence supports this.
Not only are "left" and "right" vague relative terms used to classify the electorate in the US, they also encompass a whole array of issues an things that aren't binaries that fit on the axis. Someone can be pro-Israel and yet overall of the left; just as someone can be very pro-Palestine and yet overall of the right. In fact on this particular issue this seems more and more common - the real divide is probably generational versus political. I recently heard a segment on the radio from a convervative evangelical bemoaning that their future leaders were increasingly "anti-Israel" and this was a huge problem.
In America, we simply roughly assign Democratic positions - left, Republican position - right. These are both really big tents. "Left" positions include support of candidates like Sanders or Mamdami but also in practice even stronger support for candidates like Clinton and Biden.
Arguing that someone is "on the right" simply because they don't support your candidate of choice is silly; it's sort of like the rightists out there arguing Trump is a liberal RINO because he doesn't support the bedrock conservative principle of free trade.
> Their opinion columns like David Brooks etc are blowhard conservatives too.
NYT does make a show of having a "balanced" opinion panel and David Brooks is one of the token (2 of 11 in the source link) conservatives, but it seems strange to describe such a bland, anodyne person (also anti-Trump, by the way) as a blowhard. IIRC one of the complaints from the opinion editor that got fired for printing pro-Trump letters to the editor was that not one single columnist was pro-Trump and therefore obviously didn't represent any mainstream conservative audience.
edit: this was the nyt article I was thinking of: https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/12/14/when-the-new-york-...
Idk, it feels a lot to me that NYT is taking marching orders from the same people that control the Fox News propaganda machine.
Obviously NYT is rarely explicitly pro-Trump but that's not their point. Instead, they give a liberal’s framing on right wing talking points.
For example, they ran the manufactured Claudine Gay story front page 10 days in a row. They give the “sensible liberal”s take on why trans people should not get healthcare. Article 3 today is pro tariffs.